While it’s still a big property on its own, Harry Potter isn’t the only huge franchise where Warner Bros owns the video game rights. The entertainment giant also owns the rights to Tolkien’s seminal work, The Lord of the Rings. Now that some dust has settled on Hogwarts Legacy, Lord of the Rings fans have begun imagining what a game set in Middle-Earth could be like if it got the same treatment.
While there has been a plethora of games set in the Lord of the Rings universe that don’t all tell the story laid out in the books, there’s never been a game quite like what Hogwarts Legacy has done for Harry Potter. As Reddit user Matej1889 puts it, “imagine a Lord of the Rings game like Hogwarts, but with better quests and real impact on the world. It would be awesome!”
Replies to the above post chime in with further suggestions of making the game an actual RPG and not quite the same as the action-adventure treatment of Hogwarts Legacy.
Many Reddit users point out that Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and Middle-Earth: Shadow of War are open-world Lord of the Rings games, but just as many replies refute that it’s not the same, either because they aren’t full RPGs or there’s not enough lore behind them.
While Hogwarts Legacy is set in a definite spot in time and the lore is still empty in enough places for video games to create something unique, the Lord of the Rings is less flexible. So a main problem for any Lord of the Rings game would be to balance between being too lore-heavy to turn off those less knowledgeable, but not too light as to upset the purists.
There’s likely to be plenty of things coming down the line considering the massive success of Hogwarts Legacy, so it’s all up to Warner Bros. where things go from here.
Published: Feb 15, 2023 05:52 pm